Contents
Free vs Pro - Plugixa Chauffeur
The free edition is a complete booking system, not a trial. Customers can book and pay, you can manage bookings, vehicles, forms and availability, and nothing in it is time-limited or switched off.
Pro is the same plugin plus a pro/ directory. Whether a feature exists on
a site is decided by whether its code is there, never by a licence check.
Booking and payments
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-step booking wizard, placed with a shortcode | yes | yes |
| Distance service type | yes | yes |
| Hourly service type | yes | yes |
| Flat rate service type, with predefined routes | - | yes |
| One-way and return trips | yes | yes |
| Several booking forms, each with its own service types, currency, lead time and minimum passengers | yes | yes |
| Fare recalculated on the server for every quote and booking | yes | yes |
| Cash, bank transfer and pay-on-pickup payment methods | yes | yes |
| Stripe Checkout, with payment confirmed by webhook | yes | yes |
| Booking emails to the customer and to you | yes | yes |
Pricing
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Base price, per-distance price, per-hour price and minimum price per vehicle | yes | yes |
| Pricing rules: surcharges, discounts and fixed totals by day, date, distance, passengers and service type | - | yes |
| Fixed-price routes | - | yes |
Managing the business
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboard with the last 30 days | yes | yes |
| Bookings list and booking detail, with status and payment status | yes | yes |
| Calendar of bookings | yes | yes |
| Vehicles and vehicle types | yes | yes |
| Locations | yes | yes |
| Availability: lead time, booking horizon, business hours, blackout dates | yes | yes |
| Drivers, and assigning a driver to a booking | - | yes |
| Reports for any date range | - | yes |
| CSV export of the bookings in a report | - | yes |
| Print-ready invoice for a booking | - | yes |
| Invoice letterhead settings | - | yes |
For developers
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
REST API under plugixa-chauffeur/v1 |
yes | yes |
| Actions and filters | yes | yes |
| REST routes for drivers, pricing rules, routes and reports | - | yes |
The plugixa_chauffeur_invoice_capability filter |
- | yes |
The Pro pages are Drivers, Pricing rules, Flat-rate routes, Reports and Invoices.
How the two editions differ
At start-up the plugin looks for feature modules in two places:
includes/Modules/<Name>/Module.php every edition
pro/includes/Modules/<Name>/Module.php Pro only
The free download does not contain the pro/ directory at all, so the second
search finds nothing and the Pro modules are never created. That one fact has
several visible consequences.
- There is no licence check on features. No code asks whether a licence is
valid before running a Pro feature. If
pro/is on disk, its features run. - Pro routes do not exist in free. A request to
/drivers,/pricing-rules,/routesor/reports/summaryon a free site returns WordPress’s ordinary 404 for an unknown route, not a “please upgrade” refusal. - Pro screens are not in the free admin app. The free build ships its own compiled admin app with no Pro screens in it. There are no greyed-out menu entries and no locked pages.
- The Pro engines are not loaded. The pricing rule engine and the flat-rate service are listeners on the plugin’s own filters. In free nothing is attached, so the base fare stands and the wizard offers Distance and Hourly.
The one thing the admin app does learn is whether the pro/ directory is
present, and it uses that for a single purpose: the Upgrade to Pro link in
the user menu is hidden when Pro is already installed.
Licensing, updates and the account pages are handled by the Freemius SDK. See Privacy and uninstall for what it sends and when.
Moving between editions
From free to Pro
Install Pro in place of the free plugin. The database tables Pro needs (drivers, pricing rules, routes) are created by the free edition too, so there is nothing to migrate. On its next load the plugin notices that the set of modules on disk has changed and re-runs its table and capability set-up by itself, without a deactivate and reactivate.
From Pro back to free
Nothing is deleted. What changes:
| Pro data | What happens without Pro |
|---|---|
| Drivers | Kept in the database. The Drivers screen and the Assigned driver field are gone. Bookings keep their assignment. |
| Pricing rules | Kept in the database, but nothing applies them. New bookings are priced at the base fare. |
| Routes | Kept in the database. The Flat rate service type is no longer offered. |
| Booking forms with Flat rate on | The switch is remembered but ignored. A form whose default was flat rate opens on the first type it still offers. A form with only flat rate enabled has no service type left to offer and the wizard falls back to the distance fields, so switch on the type you want on such a form. |
| Existing bookings | Unchanged, including flat-rate bookings and totals that pricing rules adjusted. |
| Invoice settings | Kept in the settings option, with no screen to edit them and no invoice page. |
Reinstall Pro and everything above is live again.
Where readme and code differ
The plugin’s readme lists features in general terms. Where it and this documentation disagree, this documentation describes what version 1.0.0 does. In particular: customers cannot cancel a booking themselves, the booking wizard has no map and does not calculate distances, and the wizard does not collect a return date and time. See Troubleshooting.